Newsletter
Rwanda & Antarctica to India & Iceland
A full year behind, and another one ahead…
Dear Friends,
As the new year is starting, in addition to wishing you a wonderful 2014, I wanted to give you a quick digest of what’s coming ahead and of what has happened in the last few months…
First, for the news that’s right around the corner: I am off to India very soon for a nine-month Fulbright Fellowship! I’ll be based in Kolkata and traveling regularly to the Northeast of the country to research my next film, which will focus on the monsoon… Parts of Northeast India happen to be the place in the world where it rains the most – the wettest place on earth. I could not resist this one!
My head has also been occupied recently with another part of the world – Iceland. In October, I was invited to attend Earth 101, an event organized by Gudni Elisson from the University of Iceland, in collaboration with the Reykjavik International Film Festival. The purpose of this event was to bring together climate scientists and filmmakers to brainstorm about how to communicate on issues of climate change.
In these photos, taken during an outing to Thingvellir National Park in Iceland, the place where the continental plates of America and Europe meet, you can see fellow filmmaker Phil Coates and Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer and climatologist who heads up research on physics of the ocean research at the University of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in full filming action. Also, posing is a good part of the gang who attended the conference, including blogger Peter Sinclair of Climate Denial Crock of the Week, Kari Norgaard, author of Living in Denial, Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life, from the University of Oregon, physicist and climatologist, and prolific author, Michael Mann, prolific author, who runs the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, Stefan, yours truly, Gudni, his wife Alda Björk Valdimarsdóttir, who also teaches at the University of Iceland, and the mystery man, who I hope will forgive me for not knowing his name.
I seized the occasion to revive a project I started working on a couple of years ago. I’m planning to create a large-scale immersive video installation, which will bring together footage I shot in Antarctica and New Zealand with newer footage I will film in Iceland. The installation, a fifty-meter long tunnel of images and sounds, will use video game technology to allow the viewers/users to project themselves into the images, in order to experience landscapes to which they might not otherwise have access, in as immersive a way as possible.
Both these projects are explorations of our relationship to a rapidly changing and increasingly inhospitable world. It’s exciting and energizing to be embarking on these new works, and to focus my energies on these new geographic and artistic territories.
In the midst of preparing these two projects, I’ve kept busy with other things…
In relation to my India monsoon project, I spent a few weeks this summer in Myanmar at the invitation of the first Human Rights and Human Dignity International Film Festival where I showed MY NEIGHBOR MY KILLER. The four-day festival was a huge hit with almost every screening packed to the gills. And spending time in Myanmar at this historic moment when the country is transitioning out of a brutal military dictatorship was fascinating.
Last month, I spent a few weeks in Haiti, conducting a documentary film proposal writing workshop at FOKAL in Port-au-Prince. FOKAL is an extraordinary institution, really a one-of-a-kind place dedicated to culture and knowledge, and it was an intense experience nurturing nine interesting projects.
I spoke about my work in progress at an alumni event for the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. Before the event, they recorded this interview of my current work.
